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“Rebecca, do you happen to have a notebook I could have? I’d like to take notes, keep track of his meds, and maybe we can make a chart of everything he’s had and when he needs it again. I think you and I need to make a plan for ourselves for however long this takes.” I couldn’t believe I’d just said that. “I don’t mean it like that. I just mean…”

“Oh, Nikki, I know what you mean. The past few weeks Will has been doing most of his medications on his own, but he is at a point now where we need to manage this more for him, and I think having a chart of some sort is a great idea. I’ll go grab a notebook from the dining room. We have a lot to talk about still anyway, it might be a good thing for you to have something to write in anyway,” and with that, Rebecca left, leaving me sitting at the table, a wet tissue in my hand, watching Wendy take inventory of supplies she was leaving at the house. I lost it again. Sobbing, I mumbled something to Wendy about going outside and left the house where Will and I spent so many days and nights falling in love; the house where he would take his last breath.

Walking down to the beach, I couldn’t feel anything. Numbness was a feeling was I getting used to. Chris and I got through our daily lives together. We loved one another. Our girls were growing like weeds. But I spent each day surviving until bedtime, so I could do it all over again. I was numb to the world around me. Getting a preschooler and a toddler off to school dressed and clean each day was sometimes so much of a challenge, I was exhausted by lunchtime. When Chris was home on the weekends, we were packing home improvement projects and family time into two short days while I tried to clean all the laundry and manage as many errands and cleaning tasks as I could before the next week started. Survival. It’s how I’d been living my life since becoming a mother to two amazing little people. It’s how I lived daily…surviving to lunch time, pray for a nap time, survive until Friday evening when Chris would walk in the door exhausted from his work week, hoping he’d do something to help me survive. Living in survival mode makes one quite numb. Numb from the world’s problems, neighbor’s problems, and sometimes even numb to my own issues, but always aware of each moment with my children. I’d been living my life numb so for long, I wasn’t even sure how to create feelings in my heart anymore. Unless numb was an emotion, I wasn’t feeling any. While I was surviving until the next task or until the next day or the next week, Will was living life in hospitals, clinics, spending his days and nights possibly just wondering when he might die, how it might feel, what he would lose in the process. I knew nothing about survival. Tears streaked down my cheeks. They felt hot, and they hurt. Finally. Emotion. I could survive this. Will wouldn’t survive this. First lesson learned, and first entry of my journal needed to be rethinking how I lived my day to day life with my children, my family, my husband, and my friends. I would survive, and I would be a different person.

Anger. Another emotion hit me. I wanted to scream. I did scream. I stood on the small beach and screamed. Years had taken much of the beach away. The sight of a smaller beach made me angry as well. Years gone by. Surviving to the next day. The beach wouldn’t even survive much longer. Shit! Why was everything so hard? Fuck! I screamed again. There was nothing else I could do. Nothing to say, no one to say it to. I wiped my wet eyes and looked around. The beach was smaller, the boathouse looked as if it hadn’t been painted in years, and paint was falling off in huge flakes. It appeared smaller too. I knew it wasn’t possible, but maybe, just maybe the whole world was shrinking. I turned to look back at the house. Sinking to my knees onto the soft beach, I noticed even simpler but life affirming and depressing changes. The hinges on the latch door were rusted, and the door hung crooked. I imagined the only way it would sit straight was if the eye hook was latched. It, too, was rusted. The screens surrounding the porch had a few holes and looked dingy, brown, not the grey color they were when they were newer. The roof was missing a few shingles, probably from hurricane damage. At least one hits the area each year. I imagined Will trying to care for the home after his grandfather passed away. While he, too, was dying. It dawned on me Rebecca was going to have a lot of work ahead just to repair damage done from the ages gone by without proper maintenance. Sadness passed over me, and I let it flow. I was pissed. No, more than pissed. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling, but it wasn’t relief, it wasn’t just sadness, it wasn’t just anger. But I was feeling. It wasn’t numbness. It hurt. Right in my chest, it hurt. In an effort to fight it, my heart flashed pictures of my girls to my brain, and all I could think of was how much they would have changed before I got home. Then I remembered Chris’ trip to Atlanta and how I felt it all had to be over and, I had to be back home before he had to fly out of town. Like ships passing in the night. I could imagine the moment. “Hi, honey, hope all went well, see you on Friday,” he’d say before heading to the airport. I’m sure it would be on a day when I had just walked in from a trip across the country with a new guitar in hand, dirty laundry, of course after the pesky task of watching someone I love die in front of me. I was feeling. Suddenly. All kinds of emotions were flowing. I sat with them. Imagined them all sitting next to me on the quiet, small beach. Anger, Sad, and Pissed Off all sitting next to me. I seemed to be missing Happy, Ecstatic, and Blissful, but maybe after everything, after learning to live beyond surviving each day or each minute even, I’d find them next to me instead. Laughter. I heard it. I looked around at no one; even Anger, Sad, and Pissed Off seemed to have left the beach. I didn’t know who had laughed until I heard it again and realized it was me. Great. I had swapped all of the side by side emotions for Crazy. I was back to survival. I needed to survive this, and in order to do that, I had to leave all my emotions on this very small beach and head back inside. With all of my emotions, I decided to walk back up the weed filled yard to Will’s house, leaving everyone else on the beach.

Chapter Thirteen

Wendy and Rebecca were still in the kitchen when I entered. They didn’t say a word to me, but both gathered me in their arms and just hugged me. After a few moments, Wendy spoke first. “Honey, I want you to know everything you are feeling is normal, and we all deal with these things differently.” My mind got defensive and wanted to say, ‘these things?’ But then I realized they probably saw me and my few emotions showing themselves all sitting in a row in the beach together, and maybe they’d decided I‘d lost my mind or gained my nerve, so I didn’t say anything at all. Wendy however, kept talking. After missing most of what she’d said, I finally heard her finishing with, “Mary will have books for you to take home. Just remember to let it out when you can.”

“Thank you, Wendy. Who is Mary?” I asked trying to appear as if my mind weren’t in the middle of an argument with her while she was talking.

“Mary is another Hospice nurse. They all have different shifts, and we will probably meet a few depending on when we need them and if it’s night or day or the weekend. Will likes Mary.” Rebecca was just as matter of fact as she could be, like she was just speaking of the sky being blue. I was simply reminded this was a job for these people. At some point they would not be there. They would be at home with their very alive families, watching TV or playing games with their kids while we sat there on death watch. Anger was talking to me again.

Rebecca and I spent the next few hours talking, crying, and even laughing a little bit. She shared some stories with me about the past year. We tried not to talk about the things I wasn’t really aware of, the treatments, the days in the hospital, or the obvious, Will dying. She told some big fish tales, concerts, drives through the mountains, and even a road trip all the way to the Canadian border just because Will wanted to see how far away they could get before having to turn around and come home. He’d said he didn’t even have any interest in seeing Canada, but wanted to see as much of the United States as he could. Rebecca laughed through the whole story and at how adamant Will was about simply turning around and heading home. It took them three days to drive to the northern border and back.

Before we knew it, four hours had gone by, and it was time for Will’s medication again. “Would you like to do it alone this time, Nikki?” Rebecca asked me.

“No, let’s do it together. I’m…uh…I don’t know, Rebecca, I’m scared. I’m nervous. Let’s go together.”

“Come on, bud! You and me, we got this!” Rebecca grabbed my hand, and we walked to the kitchen counter, where various bottles were lined up. I stifled a giggle, and Rebecca looked at me like Crazy was here again.

“I’m sorry, Rebecca. I have two little girls. I couldn’t imagine just leaving this many bottles…or even one bottle of medicine on the counter like this. I guess I’m just always thinking like a mom!”

“Nothing wrong with that, my dear. Nothing wrong with that! I can’t even imagine just how much is here. Drugs, I mean. You know what some people would do to get their hands on stuff like this, and here we have it just sitting out on the damned kitchen counter!” We both giggled. Maybe we would make it through losing Will. And together even!

“Let me show you everything here.” Rebecca picked up each bottle of the seven from the counter and explained each one and what it should be doing for Will.

We walked into the living room, where Will lay in the hospital bed sleeping. He hadn’t been awake much at all since Wendy was here and he’d been given his last dose.

“He’s going to be tired a lot. We’ve increased his morphine because of his pain just in the last two days, so he’s sleeping more. But,” Rebecca paused, “I guess for him, it’s a good thing.”

I sat on the floor next to his bed and put my hand on his arm. His skin remained the same gray, almost translucent, color. His body stirred a bit, and he moaned in his sleep. I whispered to him, “Hey, Will.” I was afraid to rub his arm. His skin looked like it might just peel right off the bone. “Will?” I said a little louder. “It’s time for your medicine. Will?”

He was very short with me when he woke up, almost yelling, “Owwww, wha?”

“I know you’re in pain, dawling, I know. It’s time for your meds, so the pain can go away. Okay, there, it’ll be real quick like, and you can get back to sleep once we are done.” Rebecca was all business, throwing in a little ‘darling’ that came out as ‘dawling’ with her southern accent.

“I just want to sleep!” Will yelled at us.

“I know, sweetie, I know. We’ll let you sleep, but you need these meds first. Mary says these will help you feel better.” I was impressed with Rebecca’s sense of calm. Tears were flowing down my eyes. I wasn’t sure I could ever give him these medications on my own with the same compassion and solemnity Rebecca had.

Will didn’t say much else except something about ginger. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but I saw Rebecca pull a can of ginger ale seemingly out of nowhere. She popped it open and stuck a straw in it and put it on the TV tray table near his bed. Rebecca put the two pills we’d gotten from the kitchen onto the table near his soda can and drew the syringe of blue morphine for him. With a frail arm filled with anger, he grabbed each pill. Sadly, it took him several tries to actually grip each pill, but he was determined to do it on his own. I watched him with tears still streaming down my cheeks, wondering if this was going to get easier, pausing in my mind, knowing it wouldn’t get easier for Will. Each time Rebecca reached out to help Will, he’d wave her hands away and mumble, “I got it. I said I got it. I can do it!”

Watching him, I could see my toddler I’d left at home, saying to me, “I got it, Momma, I do it.” I know I’ve heard in life when one dies, they are often much like they were when they were much younger; like a toddler who wants to be independent but can’t actually do everything by themselves. Only Will was much too young to be at that stage in life. In his thirties, I thought he shouldn’t be lying there in his home, in a hospital bed, dying. He should be helping a toddler of his own learn to do something on their own.

Once he took all three medications on his own, Rebecca took away the empty syringe, put the straw in his mouth, and told him to sip. He opened and closed his mouth like a fish out of water a few times and kept saying, “Yuck! Yuck,” while shaking his head. Just like my kids did when they took medicines. Only my kids giggled because children’s medicines actually tasted like cherry. I can’t imagine his morphine was flavored like kids’ medications. I jumped from my own thoughts when I heard him yell, “Leave me A-LONE! Why don’t you leave me alone?”

Rebecca kissed his forehead and gently touched his shoulder, grabbed my arm, and led us back to the kitchen.

“He’s not having a good evening,” she said to me. “I know when you got here, you visited with your dad a while before coming over here. You are welcome to stay here with us if you’d like, or you can get away and stay with your dad if you’d like. He won’t let me wake him in the middle of the night for his medications. He needs them. All of the nurses say he needs them, but he won’t listen. He wants to take them when he’s awake and already in pain, but what he’s not really getting is the morphine has to build up in his system. It will only work if he’s medicated all the time. He’s not there yet. I mean, he won’t let us give it to him every two hours like we are supposed to do. So he sleeps through the pain for a while, and then when he wakes up, he’s in so much pain he can’t handle it. Maybe you can talk him into a better schedule tomorrow, but I don’t think he’s going to want to be bothered any more tonight. The past two days I’ve had to blame Mary when he’s a grump. He doesn’t want to take his medications, but he seems to be more open to the idea of taking them if I remind him Mary told him to take them. He likes Mary. I think she’s his favorite nurse.” I could see tears in Rebecca’s eyes. It hit me suddenly she was hurting too. Of course she was hurting. She’d spent the past year caring for Will, taking him to appointments, watching him hurt, loving him regardless of the fact he could never promise her forever. I grabbed her and wrapped my arms around her.